Table behaviour

Hi there,

I have a website which recently had a lot of time spent on it to increase
performance, one of the things I changed were the tables, removing a lot of
the nested tables and using CSS (css2) to do certain things instead.

I read that layout:fixed being applied to tables can drastically improve the
performance, as the browse then uses a different algorythm to calculate the
rendering.

The site has a left nav, a centre panel, and a right nav, previously, if you
reduced the size of the browser window, the 2 navs would remain the same
size, but the center would be 'squished' to accommodate the window size
changes, up to a point where then you would simply lose the right hand side
of the page as you kept reducing the size of the window - this was fine, as
you had to make it pretty small to be a problem.

Since making the changes however what happens now is that the cell in the
middle does change size, but the content doesn't, its quite hard to explain
in an email, but basically no content gets 'wrapped' it simply disappears
'underneath' (or so it looks) the part of the screen which gets dragged
across...

I have tried removing the layout:fixed from the table classes in the
stylesheet, but this made no difference.

I have used in places the <colgroup> tags, but haven't had any success in
removing the problem when changing these either.

Can anyone suggest why this might be happening?

Unfortunately the page is behind a secure login so I am unable to give
access to it directly, I can supply the stylesheet, and possibly a copy of
the HTML if it's of use (it'll be quite large mind)...

Thanks in advance for any help.

Regards

Rob

PS: I am aware that tables are for data and should not really be used for
'design' etc, some times I have to make sacrifices..

Oh my.....

Often best to walk away from a problem and return a little later....

As I've just discovered....

*every* one of my cells had NOWRAP on it....lol....what a plonk....

Thanks anyway people..

Regards

Rob

Gazing into my crystal ball I observed "Rob Meade" <robb.meade@NO-
SPAM.kingswoodweb.net> writing in news:C__vd.135$Ar5.26
@text.news.blueyonder.co.uk:

> Oh my.....
>
> Often best to walk away from a problem and return a little later....
>
> As I've just discovered....
>
> *every* one of my cells had NOWRAP on it....lol....what a plonk....
>
> Thanks anyway people..
>
> Regards
>
> Rob
>
>
>

You see, this is one of the problems associated with using tables for
anything but tabular data. Use CSS for presentation, in an external
file. Only use document style for certain elements on _that_ page that
need to override the external sheet. Remove all presentational markup
from your documents and you will find yourself a _lot_ happier. Use
inline style when you absolutely have to.

If you set new documents to use the Strict DTD, and validate, the
validator <http://validator.w3.org> will make presentational markup like
nowrap stick out like a sore thumb. Don't validate for validation's
sake, validate to catch any errors that you might have missed. Using
valid Strict DTD documents will make browsers use Standards mode, instead
of Quirks mode, so you should not have too many issues with browsers
behaving badly.

Oh, and no, removing presentational markup does not mean that you're
going to have a boring page, take a look at <http://www.csszengarden.com>
if you don't believe me.

--
Adrienne Boswell
Please respond to the Group so others can share